Hit 500 arrowheads on my farm last spring and it changed how I dig

I've been walking my family's 40 acres in southern Indiana for about 6 years now, mostly after plowing or heavy rain. Last April I pulled out a perfect little Kirk Corner Notch that put me over 500 total finds on that property alone. That number really hit me because I started with just one flake and thought I'd never find a complete point. Once you pass that milestone you realize how many people lived there over thousands of years, not just one tribe passing through. The soil here is mostly sandy loam so stuff doesn't erode too bad, but I still miss plenty of them. I keep a spreadsheet with approximate locations and types, and seeing that count go up makes me wonder what else is buried under the big field I can't walk. Has anyone else tracked their total finds from a single site and been surprised by the numbers?

2 comments

2 Comments

gavin92818d ago

That 500 mark really changes how you read the land, doesn't it? One thing nobody brings up is how the depth of your finds can tell you about old flood patterns or tree falls that shifted stuff around long before you ever walked there. I started noting depth on my spreadsheet too and found some really old material sitting surprisingly shallow in one corner of a creek bend.

uma89618d ago

That exact thing happened to me on a 22 acre site near the Wabash River floodplain! I was barely scratching the surface for two years, pulling maybe 30 points total, mostly broke tips and basal fragments. Then I hit a spot where a big oak had tipped over in a storm, and I found 14 complete points grouped together in the root ball dirt, including a big Adena that must have been buried 2 feet deep originally. After that I started really tracking depth and soil layers, and I noticed the same thing you did - one section of an old creek terrace had early Woodland points sitting only 4 inches down while later material was deeper in the same area. It totally rewired how I walk that field, now I'm looking for the spots where the ground has been churned up naturally instead of just the wash areas. I'm up to 187 points from that one site now and every time I think I've got the pattern figured out, the ground proves me wrong.